Volunteering - It Does a Body Good
by Uncle Charlie
Summary: A Working Stiffs tale. A newly retired Section Two Agent discovers that in order to live in the present, he must let go of his past, even if that means his recently dead partner. Who better to show him how to live but Napoleon and Illya? Suggested by Jkkitty


When you are a Section Two agent, it's always all about The Job. Well, that and staying alive, that's pretty important, too. Then, one day, you wake up and it's all over. No more exciting trips abroad or running off to stop a coup or rescue a fair damsel. There are no more attack forces, raids, or last minute escapes. One day you are a valuable commodity and the next, you are yesterday's news.

Is it any wonder that some of us just can't let go? Some of us go into Section Three, but more often Personnel is anxious to shuffle us downstairs into the labs or the various rooms where consoles need to be manned and reported upon. After you've saved the world a few times, watching weather patterns over India gets old pretty damn fast.

Maybe it would have been different if Blaize were still alive. I'd lost my partner the previous year and I just sort of wanted to cut off the memories. I couldn't walk the halls without thinking of him, hearing him make some lame pun or snide comment. Blaize always made me laugh. After he died, I didn't see any reason for humor. Guess my funny bone died with Blaize that night.

When you are in the lower end of Section Two, you don't usually get paired up with anyone. We tend to run more in packs, but I was lucky. I had a partner. We'd been at Survival School together and instantly clicked.

Blaize was French and could make me laugh faster than anyone else on the planet. He taught me about French cuisine and wine. I taught him where all the best Jewish delis were. We drank together and we laughed together and made plans for what we would do when we retired together.

Then one day we went out on a mission together. I came back, more dead than alive, and without my friend. After that, I sort of shut down, terrified of connecting with anyone for fear of losing them, too.

Anyhow, I opted out. UNCLE has a pretty generous retirement plan for those of us lucky enough to actually live to the ripe old age of forty. Guess they figured since we'd been beaten, tortured, starved, shot, knifed and a dozen other things for Waverly and country, the least they could do was make it worth our while. We were still young enough to pursue another career in the private sector, but, honestly, after UNCLE everything else seemed a little, well, dull.

Retirement was great… For three days. After that, I decided that THRUSH could have used S_olitaire_ as a torture device. I didn't have much in the way of skill sets that didn't involve guns, adrenaline, or jet lag. That's when I remembered about UNCLE's volunteer program. It seemed like a reasonable compromise. It wasn't the little farm that Blaize and I had talked about running after UNCLE, but at least it was something to fill my hours.

I was already vetted, of course. My life is an open book to UNCLE, so that wasn't an issue. Where to put me, that was another matter. Miss Joan was the one in charge of all of the volunteers and she organized everything, from day trips to trips to the theatre, and she took no guff from anyone. I liked that in a co-worker. She'd have made a great Section Two agent.

"You're Section Two?" We met over the phone. Her voice had a slightly familiar lilt to it, but I couldn't place it.

"I was. I'm retired and have more time on my hands than I know what to do with. I want to help. Give me a challenge. I'm ready for anything."

"Can you play chess? How about gin? Or canasta?"

"A little. I'm not very good at sitting still. Why?"

"You sound like my brother, rest his soul. We need people willing to sit and play games with our older staff members at our retirement facility.

"I don't think so. I visited there once and they were all so… old."

"It will happen to us all, God willing." There was a pause and I could hear the sound of paper being rustled through. "How are you with gardening?"

"I know the difference between a perennial and an annual." I remember giving Blaize a long lecture on the difference between flowers and weeds. He countered with the argument that a flower was a weed that had been successful. I laughed until I cried. Damn, I miss laughing with him.

That was my intro to Rehab Center and it was there that I met Solo and Kuryakin.

I was coming in for the key to the gardening shed when I saw Solo. If he was here, then Kuryakin couldn't be far away. I knew of them as a Section Two agent, of course. But they were so far up the food chain that I was merely a nameless minion to them. I was a guy in a black suit who raced in after they'd done all the heavy lifting to clean the place up. They were UNCLE's Golden Boys. I was nothing to them. I was a flunky. I was…

"Good morning, Mr. Jenkins," Solo said as he came through the double doors. "I have to say things aren't quite the same at HQ with you gone. How is retirement treating you? Did you make it back to Kansas for your reunion?"

I was flabbergasted. I could tell by the dark circles under his eyes that Solo was dead on his feet and yet he remembered I'd talked about attending my college reunion at my retirement party. What a guy! I felt a strong connection to him for a moment.

"I'm okay, Mr. Solo. How are you doing?"

"Well, I could be better, but at least Illya's able to move around a bit more than yesterday."

I didn't want the details of Mr. Kuryakin's injuries lest they remind me of just how tenuous my hold had been just a few months earlier. I'd spent nearly three months here and never had a single visitor. At least Kuryakin still had his partner to fuss over him. I reminded myself that I was just here take care of the shrubs out front, that sort of thing. I struggled to come up with something that sounded both neutral but not entirely uncaring.

"He should still be in the hospital." One of the doctors had come up behind us and was listening in.

"You know how he is, Doc. He says he heals faster here."

"If he ruptures something, he'll bleed out before we can ship him back to the main house."

"He's not stupid, Doc." Solo sounded agitated now and I could tell he was anxious to quit our company and get to his partner. "He knows his body better than anyone else."

"You'd better hope so." The doctor walked away muttering under his breath, probably about the bullheadedness of Section Two agents.

"They just don't understand," I murmured aloud without realizing it. "This is what we are. This is what we do."

"Amen to that, brother."

I looked back at him and smiled. "He's in good hands, Mr. Solo, and he has you."

The smile that greeted my words was so sad and so tired that I suddenly couldn't bear it. It was hard for me to realize this man was just a few years my junior. He looked so much older than me. I grabbed the key, ducked my head in goodbye, and hurried on my way.

I was trimming a bougainvillea near the doctors' lounge's window when I heard an alarm go off. It was harsh and demanding and I knew what it meant. One of the patients had gone into cardiac arrest. I closed my eyes and said a little prayer for whoever it was and went back to my clipping. I refused to think about it so, of course, I could think about nothing else. I kept replaying that last day with Blaize in my head again and again. I wondered what I could have done that would have made a difference.

I was taking a wheelbarrow of cuttings to the dumpster when I heard two orderlies talking. They were standing in the shadow of the building, smoking.

"Poor guy. His partner is completely devastated. I heard he just went into a seizure and died right there in his partner's arms. They'd been together a long time."

"What will happen to the partner?"

"They'll reassign him or pull him. He's close to the cut-off age. He may refuse to go back out. Sometimes they do that."

Boy, did I know that feeling. Without Blaize around, I struggled every day and with every assignment to go back out. I felt I owed it to his memory, though, to finish what we'd started.

"Who?" I blurted out.

"Um, a funny sort of name. The guy in Room Five, the Russian, I think." The orderly looked over at his colleague. "Didn't it sound Russian to you?"

"I don't know. Maybe it was. Things were pretty crazy. I was more focused on trying to keep him breathing."

I ran back into the building and headed straight for Room Five. It was empty. The bed stood in disarray and the floor was littered with medical garbage – the sign that a struggle had been mounted and lost. I started to shake and reached out for the door frame to keep myself upright. _Poor Solo… Napoleon, his name is Napoleon, I chastised _myself. He and Kuryakin were so close… even closer than me and Blaize had ever been. I could feel the tears start to trickle down my face.

_Stupid old fool_, I thought and turned. That's when I saw them. Solo was pushing Kuryakin, his knees covered with a thick blanket, down the hall. Kuryakin was pale, but he looked pretty good.

"Oh my God," I blurted out, sinking into a visitor's chair. My heart twisted and clutched so much that at first I thought I was having a heart attack. Solo gave me a concerned look as he abandoned his partner and came to pat my shoulder.

"Are you all right, Mr. Jenkins? You look as if you've seen a ghost. Can I get you a doctor?"

"I heard we'd lost… I thought…"

"It was me." Kuryakin smiled at me, then sobered. "You just lost your partner last year, didn't you?"

"Yeah." I took a deep breath. "Yeah, I did."

"You didn't really, you know." Napoleon sat down beside me. "As long as you keep him alive in your head and your heart, he's still with you."

"Is that what you tell yourself?"

"It is."

"It's a lie. Dead is dead."

"Only if you choose to believe that. Living is a harder path, living alone is harder still. You need to get back into life, Mr. Jerkins."

"Is that what you would do? Either of you, if you lost the other?"

"And have him come back as a ghost and kick my ass if I didn't, yes," Solo said with a genuine smile and he leaned forward and patted Illya's knee. There was a moment of silent communication between the two of them. "Live, Mr. Jenkins, or THRUSH truly has won and that's a helluva way of thanking your partner for his sacrifice."

I left, right then and there. I was about to give up on the whole volunteering thing when I got another call from Miss Joan. "Jim, I was hoping you were free this weekend. I need your services."

"Why, Joan, I hardly know you." She laughed and I couldn't help but grin. She had such a sweet laugh, all bubbly like champagne. It reminded me a bit of Blaize's and I swear I felt him elbow me in the ribs.

"Live, _mon ami, _live." I heard him whisper and I quickly glanced over my shoulder. Nothing. Then I realized that Joan was talking.

"You are sweet, but not for a date, you rascal. We need someone for our monthly birthday party and someone with combat skills would be helpful."

"Excuse me?"

"We always throw a monthly birthday party for our widows, widowers, and children. I am a few people short and wondered if you'd fill in. And if little Sammy Hill is true to form, you might have an opportunity to use your judo skills."

Something in her voice made me pause and then ask. "Joan, are you French?"

"Only on my mother's side. My father was an Irishman and full of the devil he was." She giggled and I chuckled, surprised that I remembered how. "Oh, he was the sort who could make you laugh until your sides ached."

Solo was right, I decided. I'd tried death and found it lacking. I finally decided that life is a lot more fun

And I discovered a very important lesson about volunteering. Not every job is for everyone. It takes a special person to work with the older folks, the injured and the dying. Some folks can do it; I couldn't. I was more suited for dealing with kids. And Joan was right. Sammy was a handful, but I could spot a potential Section Two agent in the making. Taking him under my wing was the best thing I'd ever done.

Well, second best. You see, I've been spending a lot of time with Joan these days. She taught me a thing or two about surviving. I still missed Blaize, of course, but now I could smile at the memories instead of sobbing about the missed opportunities.

Now if you will excuse me, I'm going to be over in the corner making balloon animals, at least until Joan gets here. Then I'm gonna slip a ring on her finger and ask her to marry me and I'm not going to stop asking until she says yes. Solo got my ass in gear, but Joan, she made me realize there was more to life than death. And I'm not dead by a long shot.


End file.
